MediaShift’s Anna Lewis talks proofreading in this article originally from Completely Novel. If you are self-publishing, then proofreading your manuscript is a really challenging task — and you’ll kick yourself if you find a mistake after you’ve told everyone about the book. No matter how many times you’ve read through your work, it’s amazing how [...]

As a self-publishing author, you are Chairman of the Publishing Board and Chief Operating Officer, deciding for yourself, by yourself when to hit the publish button. But what informs your conclusion that today is The Day? One of the biggest chores is to tidy up first. Author Deborah Niemann comments on the trials and tribulations [...]

Self-publishing and ebooks have carried a stigma from day one by naysayers and the traditional publishing world. They forecast the book publishing pipe filled with poor and unreadable digital content because of the self-publishing ebook author. There has been an increase in errors and poor formatting introduced by the new digital books compared to their [...]

Dear Reader, I am newly self published, and like many of you I suspect, keen to get my work to a wider audience. My book, ‘The Himalayan Assignment’ is now available and there are details at www.renvyleblake.com. I will leave the plug at that! I did try to get published, but not very hard. I [...]

People are impressed with anyone who has completed the task of writing a whole book. There are thousands, if not millions, of people who have sat down to a keyboard to start writing a book but never finished it. Those who do go the distance make a commitment that goes beyond the first writing session.

It’s not easy to make the transition from a misanthropic and socially anxious writer to a self-promoting suckup, and the biggest reason I published this first book on my own was because I’ve been losing my mind trying to get agents to even agree to peek at the manuscript for my novel, which is a [...]

Since I have been doing a lot of this lately, including Beta reads and formatting, I thought I would discuss the various stages of the editorial process. This is by no means specific to self-publishing; all authors go through an editorial process of some sort, and for some, the process is much deeper than it [...]

We’ve all been there. One minute you’re smoothly cruising down Your Vision Blvd. in your 1966 Ford Mustang convertible—sunshine, blue skies, 70-degree wind blowing through your hair. All of your ideas are beautifully coordinated into coherent and meaningful sentences. Writer heaven. Then, out of nowhere, gridlock. You’ve stopped moving. It’s bumper-to-bumper traffic and you find [...]

The main difficulty in proofreading your own text is simple: you have trouble recognizing your own typos, grammar mistakes, and inaccuracies. You know what you want to say; it’s just not always communicated in your writing. When you act as your own proofreader, you may often overlook mistakes because your eye doesn’t recognize them as mistakes.

Publishing my first novel has been a very interesting experience. Now that it is being read by many and reviews are pouring in, I’m learning something new regarding editing – you need many eyes. I did pay to have my text professionally proofread and edited, however, even then things have squeezed through the cracks. After [...]